President Donald Trump rang the opening bells of the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq exchanges remotely from the Oval Office Monday morning to tout the launch of “Trump accounts,” which will use federal money and private donations to start newborns off with $1,000 in savings.
But the dynamics of that move — the country’s first billionaire president leveraging his financial experience to help the masses — could not be more at odds with the unprecedented crypto enterprise Trump and his sons have been running over the last year.
Trump, who called Bitcoin a “scam” back in 2021, made more than $1.4 billion through his family’s own cryptocurrency venture in 2025, while hundreds of thousands of everyday investors in the venture lost their shirts. It was the president’s most profitable year ever across any business in his multi-decade career.
Fatime Elrgdawy, a 29-year-old software project engineer from California, told Reuters she lost more than $1,000 in savings on one $TRUMP coin play last year. At first she thought, “Oh my God, this is brilliant,” she told the news wire, but within five months her $2,000 investment was worth less than $120.
Still, she told Reuters, she considers herself lucky compared to other more heavily invested $TRUMP buyers into a meme coin that lost 97% of value from its January 2025 peak.
The Trump family launched its main crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, in the fall of 2024, in the final throes of Trump’s third presidential campaign. The move came after months of candidate Trump’s overtures to the industry, such as promising to fight for a national Bitcoin reserve. The crypto bosses seemed pleased, with billionaire executives backing the Trump campaign and the crypto industry emerging as the top sector donating in the 2024 elections.
Their faith in Trump and his Republican allies was soon rewarded. Bitcoin hit an all-time high in 2025, and the Trump administration drastically scaled back efforts to police the industry and stop crypto scams, while pardoning convicted fraudsters.
The Trump family, meanwhile, did even better.
Four days before Trump was inaugurated, an Abu Dhabi royal’s company secretly bought nearly half of World Liberty Financial, steering $187 million to Trump family entities, The Wall Street Journal reported. It was a striking transaction — a foreign authoritarian buying into a U.S. president’s family business — given World Liberty’s egalitarian mission to “democratize a new financial system.”
That same week, Trump unveiled a meme coin featuring an image of his triumphant fist pump after surviving the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa. The coin made him about $636 million last year.
Trump investors haven’t been so lucky.
Roughly two-thirds of those who bought Trump’s meme coin have lost money, according to crypto data firm Nansen. As of late June, their losses totaled $3.81 billion. Another Nansen analysis, drawing from a smaller pool of data, finds that 85 percent of buyers in one of World Liberty’s tokens are in the red.
Civilian investors lost billions betting on Trump; political and financial elites backing his crypto, meanwhile, have had abundant good fortune.
The UAE, one of whose rulers bought into World Liberty, got approval last year to import highly coveted, advanced American AI chips. During negotiations, an employee at one of the royal’s investment firms reportedly held a job at World Liberty at the same time, the New York Times reported.
Another of the royal’s firms, MGX, which used $2 billion in a World Liberty coin in a recent investment, is now among the owners of TikTok’s U.S. operations, after the Trump administration spent months pressuring the social media company to spin off an American subdivision.
Asked for comment, the Trump administration told The Independent there are “no conflicts of interest” regarding his business activities. The Independent has also contacted the companies mentioned in this article for comment.
Trump, meanwhile, has described himself as being in the dark over the nature of his newfound crypto fortune.
“I could know about it,” Trump told CNBC last Thursday. “I didn’t. There’s nothing illegal. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
Meanwhile, prices for Trump’s meme coin and one of his World Liberty tokens have plummeted, part of a larger “crypto winter” of drooping prices across the entire sector.
No matter though, at least for the man in the Oval Office. As the president’s financial disclosures show, no matter what part of a financial cycle is underway, in the world of Trump and crypto, it pays to be at the top.
